Compound Words Are Clearer (5-4)

The emperor’s children:

For emperor 皇帝there was only one, under the emperor there might be few kings 王. We may roughly translate crowned prince of emperor as 太子 and prince of emperor as 皇子, and the crowned prince of king as 世子prince of king as 王子.

Now the daughter of emperor is 公主, the daughter of king is 郡主, the wife of emperor’s son is 太子妃for crowned prince, and 皇子妃for normal prince. The husband of emperor’s daughter is 驸马, and the wife of king’s son is 世子妃for crowned prince, and 王子妃, for normal prince. Husband of king’s daughter is郡马.

As the daughter of emperor is 公主，when translate Princess Diana as ‘公主Diana’. Many Chinese people don’t understand that why an emperor’s daughter married emperor’s son. Later, the translation changed as Diana 妃, as ‘Di’ sound like a typical Chinese surname 戴, so the translation finally became 戴妃 as Princess Diana. If a Chinese said戴妃 is not公主. Then translate back to English it would be ‘Princess Diana is not princess’.

Under the king, there are five classes of nobleman, similar British, they are 公duck, 侯 marquis伯count, 子viscount, 男baron. During Qing dynasty (the last dynasty), there are 12 classes of nobleman. And their daughters had 8 classes.

Hence you may get some idea of the Chinese language had a much larger vocabulary than English one, so, translating Chinese into English sometimes is impossible. While translate English into Chinese is very easy. Therefore ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ has many versions of translation in Chinese but the 24 histories of China, can’t translate even one page into English.

Picture of 24 histories:

We have said that since five thousand years ago, in Chinese royal court had an officer for recording history. Since then, China experienced 24 dynasties. People called them as 24 histories. The total number of characters are roughly 40 million. Beside the history of central government, there are many histories of states 州or provinces, then history of counties县, finally every big family had their family bible, all this material was supposed to reprint every 80-100 years, for adding new material, but none of them had been translated. That may be a key reason the western world could not understand what a Chinese people thinking about. So I am trying to translate some easy stories.